President Donald Trump delivered a speech at the Justice Department on Friday in which he made a point of bringing up past political enemies, including those within the agency.
He claimed the work of some media outlets was “illegal” and appeared to suggest that the agency should investigate a nonprofit that had in the past angered him, all while demonizing career officials who work as law enforcement there.
It’s rare for U.S. presidents to speak at DOJ headquarters, a tradition that’s rooted in a desire to maintain the notion that federal law enforcement operates with a degree of independence from the politics of the White House — but he went anyway, even as he’s under fire for trying to turn the Justice Department into a retributive arm to enforce his political views.
Trump accused CNN and MSNBC of acting more like political opposition firms than cable news networks for aggressively covering his rise to power, opting to float a vague threat against them.
“It has to stop. It has to be illegal. It’s influencing judges, and it’s really changing law and it just cannot be legal. I don’t believe it’s legal, and they do it in total coordination with each other,” Trump said.
The president complained about the writings of Norman L. Eisen, an attorney who wrote a book about Trump’s criminal trial in New York, where Trump was found guilty of 34 counts of falsifying business records. Eisen left the nonprofit Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington in 2019 to serve as an attorney in the first Trump impeachment.
But Trump on Friday incorrectly claimed Eisen was still there — and appeared to nudge the Justice Department to criminally investigate the nonprofit.
“I’m only gonna get one chance to say this,” he said to the crowd of DOJ officials. “These are bad people. I don’t know who he is or what he looks like. CREW is a charitable organization, and that’s a political thing. His sole life is to get Donald Trump, and he’s been vicious and violent,” Trump said.
Eisen told NOTUS Friday night that “the reason Donald Trump lashed out at me at DOJ is because I have been litigating against him a lot at my new organization, State Democracy Defenders Action, and we’ve been winning.”
Eisen noted that his group secured a judge’s order last month preventing the administration from leaking the names of nearly 6,000 FBI employees who worked on Jan. 6 cases.
“He doesn’t like losing, and he’s responding to it the only way he knows how. But he’s motivating me with this backhanded compliment to work even hard to stop him from stripping the American people of their constitutional rights,” Eisen added.
Trump’s speech condemned the yearslong work of the career officials in that very building while brushing aside his status as a felon in the state of New York. He also touted the loyalty of the two defense lawyers who stood by his side during that trial — Todd Blanche and Emil Bove — who now lead the DOJ as the deputy attorney general and principal deputy attorney general, respectively.
“These guys never wilted. They were not shy. They fought. They weren’t afraid,” Trump said, then turned to them directly and, leaning away from the microphone, added, “Thank you both, very much. Great people.”
Trump also railed against the 2022 FBI raid on his Mar-a-Lago mansion in which it was discovered that he’d hoarded classified documents after leaving the White House. He also lambasted what he called “a corrupt groups of hacks and radicals within the ranks of American government,” angrily described what he called efforts that “persecuted my family” and decried what he deemed “the lies and abuses that have occurred within these walls.”
“The case was bullshit,” Trump said, leaning on the lectern. The Department of Justice ran out of time to pursue the case.
Trump also lionized the thousands of MAGA insurrectionists who were tracked down by federal investigators for violently overtaking the nation’s Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, calling them “J6 hostages” and gloating about making a presidential decision to remove senior FBI officials involved in arranging their arrests from the agency.
“I pardoned hundreds of political prisoners who’d been grossly mistreated,” he said.
Former President Barack Obama used his official visit to Main Justice in 2014 to respond to growing concerns about domestic spying in the wake of disclosures by announcing a presidential directive that limited intelligence collection and to assure the public that “the United States is not spying on ordinary people who don’t threaten our national security.”
By contrast, Trump promised to tap many of the DOJ’s expansive powers to ramp up the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants, at one point hinting at possible interactions between DOJ third-in-command Emil Bove — who has led the department’s efforts to make this a top priority — and White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, the driving force behind both Trump administrations’ immigration policies.
“He’s become a big star, right Emil?” Trump said during the speech.
At the end of his appearance, Trump addressed the nature of his visit — and used it as an attempt to create the appearance of an ethical separation between his White House and the Justice Department.
“I want to just tell you that, this has been a great honor. I was asked to do it. And I said, ‘Is it appropriate that I do it?’ And then I realized, it’s not only appropriate, I think it’s really important. And I may never do it again,” he said.
“I may never have a chance to do it again. Because this is something that I’m leaving to the greatest people I know — the best people, the smartest people, the toughest people I know. And they’re going to do an incredible job.”
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Jose Pagliery is a reporter at NOTUS.